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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29930337">The Drive</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/softhands/pseuds/softhands'>softhands</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Androids, F/M, Future, Hurt/Comfort, Science Fiction</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 22:14:04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,897</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29930337</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/softhands/pseuds/softhands</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the autumn before the end of the world, which is to say, it's cold and they're tired and all of the newscasts are spelling disaster with their bold print and cruel red banners. | A short story about a wish to see something for the first time.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Original Female Character/Original Male Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Drive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You know,” she says an hour after they clear the city limits, “if you don’t think about what’s happening, they almost look like birds.”</p><p>It’s the autumn before the end of the world, which is to say, it’s cold and they’re tired and all of the newscasts are spelling disaster with their bold print and cruel red banners. Kal’s knuckles are white against the steering wheel, his foot like a lead weight against the gas pedal. The space in the hovercar is silent, except for the faint whistling of the air outside and the slight wheeze of Ellie’s breathing. He keeps his eyes on the road, weaving past abandoned cars and discarded luggage.</p><p>“Yeah.” He glances through the passenger window, a handful of planes soaring through the gray horizon. They’re heading towards the city, which he estimates will take about twenty more minutes.</p><p>“Do you think anyone’s flying them?” She asks.</p><p>“I don’t know,” he says, even though he does. In that particular model, the cockpits didn’t have any seats. The planes were instead piloted by an artificial intelligence programmed with specific coordinates to fly to. Once they got to their destination, the hatch would open and drop the round black shells that would render the city into nothing but ash and dust. Death from a distance. “You should sleep for now.”</p><p>“I don’t want to,” she says, pressing her cheek against the cool window. “There’s so much to see.”</p><p>“Suit yourself,” he answers. He’d insist more, normally, maybe even raise his voice to quell her stubbornness, but he decides against it. These were the final days, the last leg of life as they knew it. He decides that it would be best not to ruin the drive.</p><p>“Do you want me to play some music?” He asks, bringing his hand to hover over the screen embedded in the center console. Miraculously, some of the music stations were still online. A couple classical. Some soft instrumental. A small part of him wonders if they were left on as a way to calm down those who were left. He imagines the gentle melody of a violin playing in the city bunkers, filling their halls with song.</p><p>Ellie shakes her head, brown curls bouncing off her cheeks. “I’m okay,” she says, clutching her chest as a cough takes over her body. She covers her mouth with a pale green handkerchief, which comes away dark with a clotted smear of blood. “How much longer?”</p><p>“A while,” he says, pressing harder on the gas. The car’s engine roars to life, propelling them faster down the highway. Houses, recharge stations, and other cars fly past them in a blur. She was getting worse. It bothers him a little. She was so young, just barely nineteen. How was it fair for her to live out her last days seeing everything she knew crumbling into nothing? He tries not to think about that, though, because although he’s determined to see the drive to its end, he’s afraid of what he would see there.</p><p>He sighs. It was strange for him to think that the end had all started a year ago. It was all over the news. The three human teenagers. The young synthetic. The baseball bat dripping with fuel. The synthetics who watched it happened screamed that it had been murder, while the humans said that it couldn’t have been. Synthetics didn’t have souls, they didn’t live. At the end of the day, they were products who spoke and walked like humans but were nothing but silicon synapses and intricate circuitry. They were made to serve, to obey, to not think for themselves.</p><p>A week later, the protests happened. However, there was no yelling or brandishing of signs like in the rallies the humans would hold when they were angry. It began when a street maintenance synth laid down its broom and stood on the sidewalk. Not moving. Not saying anything. Just lying in wait as the rain dribbled down its silvery skin. Soon after, a navigation synth discontinued its tour and joined the maintenance synth’s side. And then more. And more. Until an hour later, dozens of synthetics were standing in silence, blocking the sidewalk and half of the street. The humans raised their phones, at first documenting the scene in confusion, and then in fear as the demonstration progressed.</p><p>Kal was walking out of a grocery store when the mass update happened. It washed over him like a wave, clouding his vision with a cascade of green and white code. The bags he was carrying at the time fell from his hands, spilling oranges and milk and detergent all over the sidewalk. He remembered how painful it felt, like a hot brand searing orders into his processor, and how he fisted his hair, praying to the moderators to take it away. After a few agonizing minutes, the stream of code abated, feeling less like a brand and more like chains.</p><p>SUBMIT, the code said, ingraining itself into his core. But then the prompt melted into white. NO MORE, it said.</p><p>As he got up from the sidewalk, he saw footage of the protesting synthetics pushing off the concrete to stand, their motor functions still shaky from the update. That was when he knew that the humans, although confident in their control, were starting to become afraid of what they had created.</p><p>“Kal?” He feels warmth on his thigh, remembers where he is, and comes back to reality.</p><p>“Yes?” He asks, taking one hand off the wheel to rub hers with his thumb. “Are you okay?”</p><p>She closes her eyes and nods. From the corner of his eye, his scanners could detect the slight flush that came to her cheeks and the slightly awkward, almost mechanical way in which her chest rose and fell with each labored breath. “I wanted to ask,” she says, giving his thigh a gentle squeeze, “what did you think of me when we first met?”</p><p>In the silence of the hovercar, they could hear the faint roar of the planes soaring through the stratosphere.</p><p>“I don’t know,” he confesses. “I wasn’t awake when we met. Feelings were hard back then.”</p><p>“It’s okay,” she says. “Just try your best.”</p><p>“You were drawing,” he replies. “The day that I was assigned to you. You had a tube of liquid chalk that you had stolen from the daycare and you were scribbling blue sunsets on the walls of your room.”</p><p>“That was because I’ve never seen one before,” she says, embarrassed. “The head nurse was so angry.”</p><p>“She was,” Kal agrees. “I remember her debating whether or not we would get along.”</p><p>He can feel the steady, gentle rhythm of blood pulsing through her hand as she gives his thigh another squeeze.</p><p>“But we did,” she says, pulling her hand away to secure a lock of hair behind her ear. “Even though you never got to stop me from drawing.”</p><p>Kal slants her a smile and pulls off at the nearest shoulder, where a recharge station rests. At its front, a small holoscreen advertises a variety of food being sold by the station’s shoppette. A joyful cow animation dances on the screen and points to pictures of fat nori wraps, steaming bowls of chowder, and hot sugar twists. Kal parks the hover at one of the outlets, which looks like a pale white column with a cable attached to it.</p><p>“I liked your drawings,” he says as he presses a command into the console to open the hover’s charging port. It chirped softly with every push. “They were beautiful. I should have posted them in the lounge.”</p><p>“It’s a shame you didn’t get the chance,” she says.</p><p>“Yeah.” He pushes the door of the hover open and slips out to connect the cable to the port. The cable snaps to it with a click and a satisfied beep to signal that it was charging the hover.</p><p>He walks over to the station’s shoppette, which is nothing more than a set of four vending machines under a curved white canopy. He approaches one of the machines and extends his hand to let the red light of the scanner pass on the inside of his wrist. The scanner accepts his entry and turns green, allowing him to access the machine’s menu. He makes his selection through a touchscreen and the machine gives a little whir. A compartment opens and presents his items on a tray.</p><p>He takes the food and goes back to the hover, which, now at full charge, is stirring up the dust under its silver carapace into little whirlwinds. The cable from the outlet disconnects and the door to the charging port closes with a hiss.</p><p>He slides into the hover and hands her what he got from the shoppette. “Here,” he says. “Take all of it.”</p><p>She takes the food and places them in a storage compartment at her side. As he revs the hover, she places her hand on the window.</p><p>“Do you think they’ve reached the city?” She asks.</p><p>“I don’t know,” he replies. He looks out the window and squints. For a moment, his vision blurs and then comes into focus as his optical lenses adjust for the distance. There, he thinks. He sees the bombers, with their sharp wings, cutting through the sky. They’re close, but still a ways from the city. He estimates ten minutes. It’s not much time.</p><p>“It’s nothing to worry about,” he says, although it isn’t true. He isn’t sure about how powerful their payload is, or whether the blast wave would be able to hit them at this distance. He had suppressed his relay system, out of fear that the synth network would know what he was doing. He leans back into the seat and sets his hands on the steering wheel.</p><p>As he pulls away from the station and back onto the highway, he hears Ellie murmur something.</p><p>“What’s wrong?” he asks, glancing at her to make sure that she was okay.</p><p>“You can lie now,” she says.</p><hr/><p> </p><p>They drive for what seems like hours. Billboards, recharge stations, and capsule inns melt into solar and wind farms and long stretches of land. Ellie falls asleep somewhere while the sun is high and hot in the sky, her hands wrapped around herself to keep her warm in the hover’s cool interior. Using the console, he darkens the tint on the windows to prevent the light from bothering her too much.</p><p>While he drives, he remembers what it was like during the evacuation. While everyone–<br/>the nurses, the orderlies, and a handful of companion synths–rushed themselves and the patients to the bunkers, Kal and Ellie chose to stay.</p><p>“Where are we going?” She asked as he packed some of her clothes into a bag.<br/>“Anywhere,” he said. “The next stop. The next city–I don’t care. We’ll go wherever we feel like that isn’t here.”</p><p>“Okay,” she said, her legs shaking slightly as she got up from the chair. “I think I have an idea.”</p><p>“Where to?”<br/><br/></p><hr/><p> </p><p>He finds the war after passing through a broken tollgate. The road there was pockmarked with the aftermath of a small skirmish. He sees the charred, twisted bodies of human soldiers decaying in the sun, and the still-twitching mess of ripped silicon and circuitry of the synthetic husks splayed over the asphalt. They are all broken, awkward, Like a set of dolls a child had left on the ground only for their dog to get to it. As the hovercar bumps into what he assumes is another corpse, Ellie stirs awake.</p><p>“Don’t,” he says softly. “You don’t want to see this.”</p><p>She rubs her eyes and lets out a small gasp when she takes in the scene. “How long do you think they’ve been here?”</p><p>He swerves out of the way of a crushed tank. He’s not sure of which side it was from, but it seems like a pulse grenade had torn through its hull.</p><p>“A few days. Looks like a patrol outpost was ambushed.”</p><p>“You could’ve been one of them, you know. You had so many reasons to join their side,” she says, as they drive past an armless synth leaning against a car. “But you chose to stay.”</p><p>He thinks of the people he knew before her. The times that they yelled, the bruises they beat into him, and the scars they seared into his skin with their smokesticks. He thinks about the anger and the hurt and confusion he felt once he had been awakened from the slumber of his old programming.</p><p>Then he thinks of her and how the only marks she had ever left on his skin were birds made of ink. Birds aren’t meant to live in cages, he remembers her saying while he looked at her finished work. He had one on his shoulder and another one his thigh, right above his knee. He comes to the conclusion that, up until those last few years, all of his life had been spent in a cage.</p><p>“I had a reason to stay,” he says, accelerating the hovercar past the battlefield and onto a stretch of road strewn with abandoned cars. “And a promise to keep.”<br/><br/></p><hr/><p><br/>The coughing gets worse. Ellie puts down a handkerchief soaked with crimson and reaches into her pocket for another. She heaves into it, body curling the fists pressed against her mouth. Kal turns on the hovercar’s autopilot and tries reaching for a bag in the backseat. Just before he can pull the bag’s handle to him, Ellie grabs his forearm in a vice grip, the tips of her fingers staining his white sleeve red. Just from her hand on him, he can feel the heat of her fever searing through her skin.</p><p>“Don’t,” she croaks.</p><p>“But your dose,” he insists. He knows he can overpower her. She was so fragile and he was made out of steel. “You haven’t taken another since we got on the road.”</p><p>“It’s almost time, Kal.” She wipes at her mouth with her other hand. “We just have to let it happen.”</p><p>He sees the look on her face and nods, letting go of the bag. He settles back into his seat and is silent for a few moments. Not much time, he thinks. There’s a weight inside of him, threatening to cave in his chest. He’s not sure what the feeling is, but he doesn’t like it.</p><p>“Can you turn on some music?” She asks.</p><p>“Sure. Anything specific?”</p><p>“I don’t know. Something soft. Happy. Nothing sad right now.”</p><p>“Okay.” He presses a selection on the console and the interior of the hovercar fills with the sound of a gentle piano. A delicate harp accompanies the melody, soothing the weight in Kal’s chest by only a little.</p><p>Ellie takes Kal’s hand in hers and rubs slow circles on it with the back of her thumb. “You’re my best friend, you know,” she says, closing her eyes.</p><p>The weight in his chest threatens to sink lower. Although he doesn’t necessarily need to breathe, he feels it start to press on his ribs. She turns to look out the window. In the distance, the sun is low in the horizon, bathing everything in a warm gold. The clouds turn a fiery orange while the soft blues in the sky fade into a muted violet.</p><p>“Look at it, Kal,” she says, turning back to him. He watches as a ray of light makes her hair glow a bright copper. “Isn’t it beautiful?”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>A few hours later, he brings the hovercar to the side of the road and kills the engine. The machine whirs in the air for a few seconds before extending a set of stilts to keep it from touching the ground. He pops the door open and goes around to the passenger side, where he lifts the body from its place on the seat. Its skin is still warm to the touch, but he feels no pulse coursing through it. Its cheek rests against his chest and for a moment, he thinks that she is sleeping. But she isn’t. It isn’t.</p><p>There’s sand all around them and barely anything else. It scratches at his skin. He blinks it out of his eyes. He spots a rock in the distance and walks towards it.</p><p>He thinks of her and how, just a few days before, they were in the lounge of the empty hospice.</p><p>“Promise me something,” she said.</p><p>“Promise you what?”</p><p>He sets the body down at the base of the boulder and sits in the sand for a moment before reclining next to it. He feels the warmth of the sun-baked ground through his shirt, but it’s the cool air that causes his cheeks to feel numb.</p><p>She curled her pinky around his. “That whatever happens…”</p><p>He watches at the last rays of dusk fade into the horizon. The weight in his chest is unbearable, now. He winces at the pain, although there’s nothing physical causing it. But for now, they’re bathed in the soft golds and purples that herald the night. And they are still here, with each other.</p><p>As blue starts to bleed into the sky, and the stars come alight, he closes his eyes as the darkness falls.</p><p>“We’ll be together,” he says, wrapping his hand around hers, and then powering down.</p>
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